I originally purchased the domain danielhollands.co.uk back in November 2011 when I was working for Propeller. I’d heard on the news that someone famous had their name’s domain name cyber squatted, and had failed, legally, to take it back for themselves. (Whoever it was can’t have been that famous, however, as I don’t remember who they were.)

Although I highly doubted that anyone would want to cyber squat my name (other than, say, someone else named Daniel Hollands), for a fiver each year, I might as well get it just in case.

Although this isn’t the first time I’ve hosted something on that domain (for the past year or so it’s had a copy of my CV which used a third party template), but this is an important launch for me for two reason, first; the site’s code is all my own work, and second; all the aforementioned code is available for all to see on Bitbucket. (I did consider moving it to my GitHub account, but Bitbucket has served me well, so I figured, credit where credit is due.)

Anyway, I open to feedback, so please feel free to let me know what you think in the comments below

Essentials

Bitbucket (Free)

I like GitHub. I use it to host my public repositories and I like what it has done for both Git (making it the de facto version control system) and the open source movement (made it easy for people across the world to collaborate on open source projects for free). But as a lone developer who currently manages 41 (and counting) private repos. across two accounts, it would cost me $100 per month to host them on GitHub.

BitBucket, on the other hand, since it added support for Git, does everything that GitHub does, but charges according  to number of users on each repo., and seeing as each repo gets 5 (or up to 8 if you refer people) users for free, I’d be throwing my money away if I didn’t use them.

Dropbox (Free)

At the time of writing my Dropbox account has 23 GBs of free storage, of which I’m using just under 80%. This is quite a bit more than the 2 GBs of free storage you start with, but if you know how, it’s quite possible to get this much (if not more) with relative ease.

Google Apps (Free)

Google Apps is a great way of having a Gmail account on your own domain name. Sure, it’s possible (via a series of email forwards, aliases, additional reply to settings, et al) to sort of do this with a regular Gmail account, but Google Apps is much more fluid, and provided you don’t set-up more than 10 mailboxes on your domain, it’s totally free. (I plan on writing a full review of Google Apps at some point in the future, so watch this space).

Basecamp (Budget package @ $20/month)

Since it’s recent rebuild, Basecamp has gone from strength to strength. I used to use Asana for my project management needs, which is free for up to 30 collaborative members, but Basecamp, which allows me unlimited collaborative members across ten active (and unlimited inactive) projects, just works better.

BE Broadband (Pro @ £28.89/month)

I think this is a very reasonable rate for what I get: 14 meg download speed, a static IP, unlimited downloads, and telephone line rental. I’m tempted to go for a fibre optic connection in my next flat, but I’m happy with this for now.

Hetzner (X2 Dedicated Server @ €29.00/month)

Up until around a year ago I was more than happy using JustHost. I had a 50% off discount code (50OFF), and paid two years in advance, meaning that hosting all my websites cost me less than £2 per month – but this was holding back my development. Since setting up my dedicated server (a local development server with the same set-up) I’ve learnt a lot about server management, Bash, Git, Apache, BIND, Samba, and so much more (even if I did get hacked in the process).

Backup script (Free)

Using a slightly modified version of a script created by Gina Trapani, both of my servers automatically create a backup, which is saved to my Dropbox account, at midnight every day. I mention this only as Chris pays $40 a month per site for for a backup solution called VaultPress.

GIT-FTP (Free)

In a similar vein to the backup script above, whereas Chris spends $15 a month to use Beanstalk to deploy his Git-based projects, on projects where I don’t have SSH access to the server, I use a simple Bash script written by René Moser.

Font Squirrel (Free)

If you’re looking for a custom font to use on a website you can’t go far wrong looking for it on Font Squirrel. Not only do they have over 800 (and counting) font families available, each of which is 100% free for commercial use, but they also provide all the tools you need to make them work. Move over Typekit, Font Squirrel got it covered.

Optional

Orange (Panther 26 @  £32.35/month)

Although not strictly needed for my job, my Android-powered mobile phone lets me keep connected on the move.

Conclusion

Unlike my previous post – which said that even though I was paid a fraction of his start-up costs, I still had all the same abilities as him – this post tells a slightly different story.

Like my previous post, I’ve listed various free alternatives to services that Chris pays for, but on a number of occasions, while the free alternative is OK, you get more for your money with Chris’s option.

For example, I’ve got 23 GBs of free storage on Dropbox, but it has cost me time and effort to amass that amount, which I did by testing beta editions of the software, linking my university account and around four years of referrals.

Also quite telling is what I don’t have on my list, such as the lack of CDN services – although It could be argued that none of my sites need it (I get nowhere near the levels of traffic that Chris gets) – or accounts/invoicing – I don’t have enough freelance clients to make this a necessity currently.

Anyway, all in all, just under £100 is leaving my account each month. Hopefully I’ll be able to get some more freelance clients in the near future, and this amount can go up as I pay for more services, but in the meantime, I think this is pretty reasonable.

But what if you’re not working on an open source project? Sure, you can buy access to private repositories from GitHub - but if you have a team of five or less, I’m here to tell you to put your wallet away.

Bitbucket for teh win

Allow me to introduce you to Bitbucket, which started life as Mercurial’s answer to GitHub, and served as a hub for the Mercurial community. I used the Bitbucket service, for a time, during my Mercurial days at Propeller, as they offered private repositories for free.

I remember at the time that this caused me much dilemma, as I knew the de-facto industry standard was becoming Git, and was keen on switching away from Mercurial for this reason, but could not afford GitHub.

This all changed on the 3rd October 2011 when Bitbucket announced support for Git.

Is it any good?

Bitbucket works in much the same way as GitHub does, and so far as I can tell, supports mostly all the same features. For example, each repository supports a wiki and issue tracking system, full history of past commits, support for pull requests, integration with a large number of services, and proably a whole ton of other git-based goodies that I’ve not even begun to explore.

They also support submodules hosted at in other locations (such as GitHub), a feature that I take full advantage of on almost all of my own projects (even WordPress ones), so you don’t need to worry about losing this feature.

Keen on taking business from their rivals, BitBucket also supports the ability to import repositories directory from GitHub, Google Code, Subversion, et al. meaning that switching to BitBucket is an easy process.

(And no, as my old work colleague Sheepy asked me, it doesn’t do anything funny like ‘covert the repositories into mercurial then back into git’.)

Value for money

Bitbucket makes its money by charging for the maximum number of people that can access each repository, rather than on the number of repositories you own. This means, for example, if you’re in a small web design firm with a large throughput, (such as Ghost Design) it could work out more cost effective than the competition, without any loss of functionality.

So, If you’re not yet using any form of remote repository for your private projects, then give Bitbucket a go., Whereas if you’re already using GitHub, a couple of quick sums will tell you if you’re better off with BitBucket, and with no more than a few minutes importing your existing repositories, you’ll be up and running before you know it.

Full discolsure

I did win a t-shirt from Bitbucket as part of their spooning promotion, but it takes a lot more than a free t-shirt to buy me. I’ve posted this message because I believe that Bitbucket offer a good service, and I want to give credit where credit is due.

*watches as tumble-weed bounces across the void*

…one of the main reasons I got a dedicated server was because of Git, and all the wonderful things that it is able to do for you.

The problem I quickly discovered was that all of my (and my employer’s) customers used shared hosting, which meant being limited to FTP for uploading changes to their websites.

This meant that when it came to deploying my changes to the server, I still had to find and upload each of the changed files manually (or think “sod it” and upload them all, to make sure I didn’t miss any).

And, if I’m honest, this became quite repetitive and boring… So what should you do if you want to automatically deploy from Git via FTP?

git-ftp to the rescue

git-ftp is a free and open source Bash script that allows you to push files in a Git repository via FTP to a remote server. But rather than upload all the files each time you push, git-ftp is intelligent enough to only upload (or delete) files that have changed since the last push.

It also has additional features such as configuration of an ignore file, which will prevent any specified files from uploading, and the ability to perform dry-runs, which simulates the upload facility, to make sure that nothing will go wrong before you do push for real.

Installing git-ftp was so simple that even I (a Neanderthal when it comes to most things Linux) was able to do it without issue, and once a repository is configured with the correct FTP settings:

$ git config git-ftp.user daniel
$ git config git-ftp.url ftp.example.com
$ git config git-ftp.password s3xyAnd1Kn0wIt

and an initial git-ftp initiation process is completed, pushing the most recent changes is a simple as:

$ git ftp push

Alternatives

To help avoid confusion, I figured it would be important to point out that there is another project hosted on github which has the same name, and does the same thing, as the aforementioned git-ftp, but is written in Python rather than Bash. As I’ve not used it, I cannot comment on it, but if Python is your thing, then you might be interested in trying that instead.

Alternatively, if you don’t mind spending a bit of money, it might be worth taking a look at Beanstalk. This is designed to be an all-in-one solution alternative to github for repository hosting, with the additional benefit of automatic FTP deployment, and third-party service integration, etc…. I gave their free plan a try, and the service they offer seems to work well…

Conclusion

…but personally, seeing as a price-tag of free is very attractive, I’m quite happy combining git-ftp and Bitbucket (more on this in a future post), and in fact do so for 12 (and counting) projects.